Am persisting with getting an ancient hard disk-less laptop up and running as a firewall and filter from my home network. When I get it all finished, will document for others.

Have cobbled together information from this forum from meo, noclobber, doom4 and others, to set up a frugal install of a remastered dsl 1.2.1 running on a usb stick, booted from a floppy. Need the gnu-utils.dsl, as some of the busybox utilities (specially tar) are missing functionality required by some other things I need to run.

So, tried to install gnu-utils.dsl from the usb stick second partition (dsl frugal is installed in the first partition) but got whole series (lots and lots) of errors like:

Yes there really is a ramdisk but it only contains 'home', 'opt' and 'var' directories.

If I understand the 'ln' command, it is 'ln target link_name'. So the 'expansion' of the gnu-utils.dsl was trying to make a link between the ramdisk resident file and a link in the /KNOPPIX/ tree - which was not possible, as it was a frugal install (I think).

So, maybe this is the problem?

Unfortunately, even if I have understood the problem, I have no idea what to do next. Any idea what to do next?

The error message says otherwise. What it is saying is that it tries to create /ramdisk/sbin/update-modules and fails. Also, the command is apparently 'cp -l' rather than 'ln', but that's not too important.

My guess is that you need to first create /ramdisk/sbin before a link can be created in it. This should have been done automatically when you install gnu-utils.dsl. What this tells me is that you are probably just trying to extract the contents of the myDSL package, which usually doesn't work. Use the command (as user dsl) "mydsl-load /path/to/gnu-utils.dsl", or install it with the myDSL button in emelfm.

Yes, I was trying to 'install' gnu-utils.dsl without using the 'mydsl-load' routine, because I am doing the remaster at a console prompt, as the root user.

I made a note of the commands within the dsl-load routine, ie: the call to mkwriteable and the syntax of the busybox tar command and just applied them one after the other.

I am pretty uncertain of the remastering environment, can I login in as the 'dsl' user to install gnu-utils.dsl and then 'logout', or rather re-login as the root user, without mucking up the remaster envirnoment?